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Photo via RI4A
I attended this vigil on Saturday night in DC to protest the Arizona anti-immigrant legislation and stand in solidarity with the people of Arizona. It was a beautiful event and I was blown away by the amazing folks gathered. Particularly inspirational were the number of young folks who shared their stories of being undocumented themselves after coming from Latin America with their parents as really young kids. Despite the fact that these young people were raised here, their opportunities are severely limited by their immigration status.
They spoke of the importance of the DREAM Act, which would give kids who were brought here before the age of 16 a path to citizenship.
Rallies, protests and vigils are being held around the country to mobilize against the legislation.
This coming Saturday is also May Day, which in recent years has been a day of activism around immigration reform. Check out Reform Immigration for America for a list of actions you can get involved in.

The intertwined prison and immigrant detention industries together form one of the biggest threats to justice our generation will face.

Immigrant detention is a fast-growing, multi-billion dollar industry that profits off of the incarceration of people of color. This expansion is not in response to a sudden change in migration patterns, as some politicians and media makers would have us think, just like the explosion in the prison population over the past few decades that’s just beginning to turn around wasn’t a response to an increase in crime rates. Rather, since we can no longer legally enslave or directly discriminate against people based on race, we criminalize people of color and send them to prison or detention centers, disenfranchising and threatening communities of color so ...

The intertwined prison and immigrant detention industries together form one of the biggest threats to justice our generation will face.

Immigrant detention is a fast-growing, multi-billion dollar industry that profits off of the incarceration of people of color. This ...

In the foreword to her debut novel The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison describes how she came to write her classic story of an isolated black girl’s disavowal of blackness. She points to the “reclamation of racial beauty” that was so central to the cultural activism of the 1960s as her motivating context, but she notes that this girl’s story is “a unique situation, not a representative one:” in order to explore more dramatically the consequences of internalized racism and sexism, Morrison deprives her protagonist of a supportive family from which she might draw strength. Morrison’s Pecola is vulnerable, bereft, utterly exposed, and suffers tragically for it.

In the foreword to her debut novel The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison describes how she came to write her classic story of an isolated black girl’s disavowal of blackness. She points to the “reclamation of racial ...

Ed. note: This post is cross-published from Ravishly, where it is part of a conversation series on police violence against women of color.

The last year has seen an uprising in the resistance to police violence the likes of which we haven’t seen since the murder of Amadou Diallo in 1999. But even in this climate of elevated attention to the issue, we rarely hear about the ways police violence affects women. Or its frequency.

The avenues for legal and economically viable employment for women of color, including queer and trans women of color, immigrant women, and especially those who are all or several at the same time, are extremely limited. Whether we’re talking about a lack of ...

Ed. note: This post is cross-published from Ravishly, where it is part of a conversation series on police violence against women of color.

The last year has seen an uprising in the resistance to police violence the ...